Chapter Text
Beatrice
I had known from long ago that I was different.
Born into a noble family with its privileges, came with it certain expectations. A lady was expected to be beautiful and demure, capable and perfect, well versed in languages and embroidery and music. With a gentle but firm hand for the management of her household. Pious and poised in all her roles as wife, mother, and lady of the household.
My mother was every inch of what a lady should be. I looked upon her and knew that I was not.
I tried.
I mastered Latin and French, and English of course. I loved to read, and disappear in the pages of a book into lands unknown. I loved reading stories about adventures and heroes, of courtly knights and courageous common folk. I loved to study, about mathematics and science and history. My tutor once told me that, had I been born a boy, I would have been a fine scholar.
But that was not to be my life.
Etiquette lessons. How to stand and hold one’s head, how to flutter a fan just so. How to walk so that one appeared to be a swan gliding over the surface of the water. Embroidery lessons, because ladies had to keep their hands occupied and their minds filled with gossip. Music lessons, because a lady must be cultured and accomplished.
That, at least, I enjoyed. There was solace in picking up my violin, feeling the polished wood in my hands and setting my bow to its strings, and making music that would lift my soul from this place.
I had a good life. A noble and privileged one, filled with comfort. I would be protected by my father and mother, until the time came that I would take a husband and be a mother and wife myself. It was a good life that other people envied.
But why did something always feel wrong?
What else was there, my head would say to my heart. What else could a lady ask for?
And every time my heart would say, in a whisper, there was something more beautiful than this. Something more.
That sense of disquiet only grew, and while I was always a quiet child, I grew even more quiet and closed into myself. I loved to play music, I enjoyed the intricacies of learning a new language, and I loved to read, to cast myself into another story and dream of a life beyond this one. But the rest was just rote, a duty I did not enjoy.
My mother noticed me one day, as I sat and struggled with my embroidery, looking out my window into the training yard below. The men and the women who guarded our castle trained there and I often found myself watching them as they trained, as they transitioned from stance to stance, and practiced every thrust and parry in a way that seemed like a dance. A beautiful, deadly dance. I had never seen war as our land had been blessed by peace, but I had seen the effects of battle. I knew the blood and gore, or at least the aftermath of it. It did not take away from the beauty or the grace of their movements.
That day, I must have stared longer than I thought, because my mother put down her embroidery and sighed. I flushed and immediately brought my eyes back to my work, but the damage had been done.
“You want to go out there, don’t you?” she said.
I looked at her, daring to hope but wondering why she would even ask. Noble daughters did not train with soldiers. Most never trained with arms at all. She searched my eyes and I tried not to show it, but something inside was saying, yes, that is something you are supposed to do. And finally, she said, “I can speak to the master at arms. Perhaps he can find someone to train you with a rapier, something more fitting for a lady than a broadsword.”
I grinned and I could not remember feeling that leap in my heart since I was a young child. I took her hands and kissed them. “Thank you, Mother.”
She smiled at me fondly, even though it was clear that she did not understand. “Your stitches were never straight anyway. Learning to defend yourself is a better use of your time.”
I was introduced to the master at arms the very next day. He was a broad man, burly, with arms like tree trunks and a grizzled, scarred face. He took one look at me and said that a fencing master was not available, but he could teach me to use a dagger until one could be found. To defend myself, as my mother had said.
And so, I learned to fight. First with a dagger, something small to keep on my person, and how to fight unarmed. How to get out of a handhold or an arm around my neck. When I showed proficiency with that small blade I progressed to a short sword and shield. The rapier that my mother had mentioned in the beginning was nowhere to be found as the master at arms scoffed at it and called it a noble’s toy. My mother, surprisingly, did not object at seeing me wield this weapon. When my father found me training, months after I had started, he objected.
“What will her future husband think?” he blustered. That was all I was to him. Without a son, my only value was in the alliance that I could bring through my marriage.
My mother shrugged. “That she has something to occupy her time. Something to keep her strong. And a blessing in case the castle is ever attacked.”
“It is not fitting for a lady,” he said with a frown.
My mother only arched a brow, her tone honey-sweet. “Are you the expert in lady-like matters now, husband?”
That was the end of that. I was allowed to keep training and I threw myself into it. To the detriment of some of my other studies, I might add, and I never truly understood why my mother allowed it. Maybe she could see that when I practiced with my sword and shield, when I sparred with the master at arms, I lost myself in the motions. In the thrust and parry and dance of an imaginary battle. I would finish training with my arms and legs swore, my face drenched with sweat, but I was happy. I would wash up and go to dinner with a smile on my face and my mother would smile back at me, happy to see me at peace, but even that was short lived.
Because as I grew, that sense that something was not quite right, that this was not who I was meant to be, only grew.
Maybe it was the marriage proposals that were starting to come. I was only fourteen. Old enough to be wed, my father said. But I looked at the pimple faced boys and older men and I cringed, but only inside where my parents could not see me. How could I be a wife to any of these men?
I had wondered for years what it was the other girls saw in them, the boys and men who would sometimes show off their muscles as they trained. The girls my age would titter and blush behind painted fans, and I would not. I could appreciate beauty on the male form when it was presented to me, but I never could understand why it captured imaginations so. I preferred the company of my books and my training master to any of those men.
But one day I understood, and in a way I never could have expected.
She was the daughter of a visiting noble, a distant friend of my father’s who had been invited for the summer. She had blue eyes and fair hair, like the color of summer wheat when it was ripe and ready to be harvested. She had this smile that was so bright I thought that it might blind me. I was surely struck dumb the first moment I saw her alight from her carriage into my family’s courtyard, standing there with my mother and father waiting to receive them. She looked up at me and smiled, and it was only when my mother leaned in close to whisper, “It is not polite to stare,” that I shut my mouth and averted my eyes.
How could I not stare? She was beautiful, unlike anyone I had ever seen or known. Light to my dark, fair of hair while mine was an inky black. Her laughter loud and bright and drawing every eye in the room, while my tendence was to be quiet, to watch and observe.
I did not know what it was that always drew my gaze to her, only that it kept turning to her again and again. One day she looked up and found my eyes on her and she smiled at me. She bade me sit next to her and, in a way that I would come to understand was simply the incredibly friendly nature of her, invited me into her world.
For that summer, we were inseparable. While our fathers worked on one project after another, we spent all of our days together. She joined me in my lessons, as was proper, and watched me during my training sessions with the weapons master, which in hindsight, was not altogether proper. For the first time I understood why people would abandon their training to spend all their time with someone for no other reason than to look upon their face or listen to their voice. There was just something about her, and her smile, how the light would catch her blue eyes just so. And she would turn to find me looking at her and always smile back.
It was innocent then, truly, the enjoyment I found in her presence. The days we would spend together. The long hours spent reading beneath the broad oak trees. Swimming together in the lake by the house. It was innocent, surely, that first time I reached for her head and led her laughing into the forest after a fawn and its mother.
Perhaps it wasn’t so innocent when, huddled together behind a bush, I looked over to find her leaning close to me, looking at me as I had often looked at her. Her gaze flicked to my lips and I felt my heart catch, before she looked into my eyes. There was a question there, a wondering, but no fear.
What was there to be afraid of? We hadn’t yet learned to fear.
When I kissed her, brushed my lips against hers, it was only long enough to barely feel her warmth before I pulled back. Wanting to know if this was all right. All the answer I needed was in the smile of her eyes.
It was innocent still, even though part of me, surely some part of me, knew that it was forbidden.
I had been raised to believe in the one true faith, of course. I believe in God, believed that we had been saved by his mercy, believed in his love. Sometimes when it seemed that there was nothing else, I had that. Of course, I had been learned about the differences between men and women, and the sin of Eve, and how it was right and proper for men and women to be husbands and wives to each other. Every child, noble or not, is taught this. But that part of the teaching played only a small role in my life until then. What did it matter when my fate was determined already as the only daughter of a nobleman? What did it matter if I did not seem to feel for boys what the girls seemed to feel? What did it matter those seemingly stolen verses from the bible that spoke of love that could not be quenched even by the deepest waters, of hearts beating faster from a single glance? The path of my life had already been set for me. I found purpose in my training, and in my books found the life that I only experienced in dreams.
But then, in that moment when my lips met hers, that part suddenly became real.
Suddenly it all mattered.
I was sixteen then.
We both must have known, even though we said nothing of it, that the way in which we looked at each other had changed. That our hands tended to linger longer than they had before. That what had been a casual arm in arm as we strolled together became hands intimately woven when we were alone.
We never did more than kiss.
Kisses on soft lips. Kisses snuck behind doorways between lessons. Kisses enjoyed in full, in the forest and by the lake that gave us our own private place. My heart beat faster, my palms would sweat, and then sometimes I would just laugh from the ridiculousness of it all. Her smile told me she felt the same, this same giddy feeling in my chest.
It was joy and beauty and life like I had never known.
And yet I knew, without having to be told, that it had to be kept secret. Because all too often those things that brought us joy were quashed in this world.
I knew that then, at least in principle.
I was not prepared for the moment when we were found out. Nothing so tawdry as my parents or hers walking in one us, or anyone spying on a private moment. No, we were betrayed by our letters. We had been leaving little notes to each other. Small moments, but unknowingly intimate. Things like, “I looked up into the bluest sky, and thought it paled next to your eyes.” Or: “Your hand in mine, soft and tender, never wanting to let it go.” Those notes we kept, squirreled away where no one could find them, Pieces of memories to hold onto long after the summer ended and she was gone.
We were betrayed by a letter that had not yet been given, one that spoke of love and longing and of missing her when she left for home. A letter that I had been writing for her. I was careless, leaving it on my desk when I was called away for an errand, and returning to find my mother, her face pale, her expression aghast as she looked at me, my unfinished, unsent letter crumpled in her hands.
She never blamed me for that letter, never said it was my fault that our secret was now out. Our summer ended a day later when her furious father bundled her into their carriage, and the last time we touched was the last desperate hug we shared before she was whisked away.
I never had the chance to finish the letter or to give it to her.
I was told I would never see her again. That what we felt for each other was wrong, abhorrent in God’s eyes, the greatest sin. I must repent, or damn my eternal soul.
I was distraught. Where there had been light there was now dark. Silence when her laughter and her voice had been. On top of that, now the damnation of my soul.
But wasn’t God made of love? How could he hate so much that which brought me love?
I never understood. I never would.
I was sent away to a convent on the southern coast on the far edge of my father’s lands. These women were sworn to silence, and in the quiet of their convent, there was nothing to do but read scripture and think. My parents told me that I was sent there to repent, to beg forgiveness from God for my sin, not to return until I had repented. But no matter how much I read, no matter how the sisters in the convent pointed out the verses that told me my love was a sin, no matter how many times the priest asked me to forswear my feelings for her – I could not. Because they were the truest thing, the most beautiful thing, I had ever felt.
And so I held onto them, even though it meant I was not forgiven, and the priest continued to tell my parents how I shamed them.
I was in that convent for a year. I was seventeen when I saw my mother again for the first time since I was sent away. My heart caught in my throat to see her riding through the gates of the convent on her white palfrey, looking beautiful and ladylike as always.
I rushed outside to see her, just happy to see her face. Felt my heart lift for a moment when her eyes met mine, and I could see love in them still. Her face hardened a moment later and her eyes narrowed, but I held onto the love I had seen there.
“Daughter,” she said, her voice stern. “You have failed to repent, to see the error in your ways. You leave your father and I no choice.” She took a deep breath as if steeling herself. “You are being sent to the Order of the Cruciform Sword.”
My heart leapt into my throat. I gasped. The Order? A group of warrior nuns who dedicated their lives, not only to Christ, but to protecting the world from the demons and devils who would tear it asunder. They were warriors, trained from a young age to fight. It was an honor to join their ranks and girls were committed young, between five and twelve. I was older than what they would normally allow. I would have to prove myself worthy to stay.
It was the best I could have asked for. I could not return home, not now. Not when the thought of marrying a husband and having his children was enough to make me want to run away and never come back. When I knew nothing else, that future was tolerable, but now that I knew I could never go back.
This was the best-case scenario, one where I could live a life of honor and service. One where I could continue to train and study.
But…it also meant the end of the life I had always known. The Order was based in Spain and sent throughout all of Europe. If I were to join them, who knows when I would see my mother again.
“Mother,” I said, my voice weak. I looked at her, knowing I wanted to go, but not wanting to leave her.
Her eyes softened, just barely. “Go, Beatrice. It may not be the life I wanted for you, but I think it can bring you happiness.” She sat tall again and was once more every inch the lady. “Bring honor to your family, my daughter. Conduct yourself with honor, and forever keep your vows.”
She turned her horse and rode away. I would never see her again.
Duty. Honor. Chastity.
These were my vows when I pledged myself to The Order. They would be my family, and I would be theirs.
That was my life.
Until Ava.